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Steve Jobs ‘single-handedly’ created the digital music market

Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple who died aged 56, has been praised for revolutionising the music industry and bringing it into the digital age.

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Steve Jobs

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Apple founder and former CEO Steve JobsPhoto: EPA/GETTY IMAGES

On the day of his death, music industry and technology analysts have praised the way Jobs managed to create iTunes in 2003, saying he dragged the record labels into the web age.

Mark Mulligan, digital music expert and former senior Forrester analyst, said: “Steve Jobs single-handedly pulled the music industry into the digital age. Until he created iTunes, there was no legal digital music service which was fit for purpose.

“When Jobs convinced the record labels to put their collections in his store online – it change everything. Up until that point, if you bought a track online, you could only access it on the PC you had bought it on – something inconceivable nowadays…Without Jobs’s intervention the digital music market would not be where it is today.”

In April 2003, just as the third-generation iPod was released, Applelaunched iTunes with 200,000 songs.

Before iTunes, music executives had failed to be convinced about the success of an online music market. But coupled with Apple's hugely-successful iPod - launched just two years earlier - Steve Jobs proved it was a market worth exploring.

The product was an immediate success selling one million songs in its first week and by December it had sold 25 million songs. In 2010 iTunes song downloads hit 10 billion.
There have been several updates of iTunes, the most significant being the introduction of film purchase and rentals in 2008. This week, Apple announced that iTunes will be accessible across all their devices as part of their move into "cloud" computing.
Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive, (another digital music service which has been highly praised for disrupting the existing model with its streaming offering), tweeted this morning; “Thank you Steve. You were a true inspiration in so many parts of my life, both personal and professional. My hat off to our time's Da Vinci.”
Musician and technology PR, Christian Ward, tweeted that Jobs’s music intervention had “sped up the demise of an industry, but created a lifestyle from the ashes”.
Moreover, in a 2009 edition of Fortune Magazine, Jimmy Iovine, founder and chairman of Interscope Records, said: “Whatever anyone says about Apple, if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs there would be no legitimate music online.”
However, Mulligan thinks Apple’s love affair with music has started to wane, as the record labels have been increasingly difficult to work with.
“Apple is not in the business of selling content – its focus is selling devices. It doesn’t get the best return of investment from music and the labels are tough to deal with. Consequently, it has found other pieces of content, such as apps, videos and games, which have become better tools to market its latest devices on. I suspect the music industry’s window of opportunity with Apple has closed.”